ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
The Justice Department is backing off of civil rights investigations into several police departments across the country. It's moving to quash two proposed consent decrees. One is in Louisville, Kentucky, where police killed Breonna Taylor. The other is in Minneapolis, where George Floyd died at the hands of police five years ago. Louisville Public Media's Roberto Roldan has been following this. Hi there.
ROBERTO ROLDAN, BYLINE: Hi. Thanks for having me.
SHAPIRO: What prompted the DOJ to investigate the Louisville Metro Police Department in the first place?
ROLDAN: So there had been criticism of LMPD for decades, but the police killings of Breonna Taylor in March of 2020 was really the match that ignited this powder keg. It led to an entire summer of protests, investigations of the officers that were involved in the raid on Taylor's apartment. And then ultimately in 2021, the DOJ launched this probe. The investigation took two years, and it ended with a scathing report that accused law enforcement of constitutional violations and discriminatory policing in the Black community. This consent decree agreement that the city and the DOJ signed last year included dozens of proposed reforms that were meant to address the things that the report found.
SHAPIRO: So after that yearslong process, did the consent decree go into effect? Did the reforms happen?
ROLDAN: No. No, it didn't. So consent decrees have to be approved by a federal judge, and that just hadn't happened yet. Basically, consent decrees are settlements to lawsuits. So those allegations of misconduct were the basis for a civil rights lawsuit that the DOJ filed against the city. But in Louisville, a federal judge in December asked the city and the DOJ for more details about these allegations, which allowed time for the Trump administration to then come in in January, continue to delay, and then this morning, to file a motion to dismiss the whole thing.
SHAPIRO: What's the response been from city leaders and the community there in Louisville?
ROLDAN: Mayor Craig Greenberg and the police chief have been promising for months now that they're going to implement the reforms regardless of what the Trump administration decided to do. And so today, just hours after the DOJ announcement, they held their own press conference and reiterated that. Bishop Dennis Lyons was at the press conference. He's a longtime civil rights and police reform advocate in Louisville. And what he said is that city leaders are saying the right things, but he questioned whether the Black community is actually feeling that change.
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DENNIS LYONS: And that's, I think, where the mayor and the chief of police need to focus on is, you know, what is the Black community saying? I know what they say - it's statistics. But are we seeing what they see, and are we feeling?
ROLDAN: What Lyons is referencing there, city officials presented stats about how crime is down, and they say community trust is improving. But he says he hasn't heard the same optimism from residents.
SHAPIRO: So where does Louisville go from here?
ROLDAN: Well, it wasn't exactly a surprise to city leaders. Right after today's news from the DOJ, the mayor had his own reform plan ready to go. He released it. It's 200 pages long, and he's calling it a community commitment. It's basically a local consent decree. We're still working through it, but it does seem to include most of the reforms that the city and the DOJ already agreed to under President Joe Biden. One of the big challenges moving forward, I think, will be how the city provides the independent oversight that a traditional consent decree offers. The city says it plans to hire a third-party monitor to make sure that the police department follows through with those reforms.
In Minneapolis, the police department is already under a similar consent decree with the state that officials say is going to remain in place. But Trump's DOJ is planning to drop six ongoing investigations into police agencies across the U.S., including Memphis and Phoenix, essentially ending the prospect of consent decrees in those places. The DOJ, meanwhile, says that these agreements are costly to local police departments and that they're a form of micromanagement.
SHAPIRO: That is Louisville Public Media's Roberto Roldan. Thank you very much.
ROLDAN: Yeah, thank you.
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